Figma reported 1,886 employees as of December 31, 2025, up 86% in a single year, according to its SEC filings. The design software company nearly doubled its headcount in the same year it listed on the NYSE. This piece covers Figma’s workforce size, department mix, geographic split, pay, hiring pace, and review scores, using figures from Figma’s own earnings release, SEC-sourced headcount data, Revelio Labs, Unify, and Glassdoor. Key Figma Employee Statistics The short version, with per...

Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race t...

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts. Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is inclusive, wise, or even good for the people already depending on it. A majority can still decide that ...

AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it". I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down. And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the option, sadly they don't yet provide service at my studio. So I'm stuck with only one high speed wired provider. I may add on my own 5G backup Internet connection in the fut...

Honeywell Aerospace is building trusted autonomy for both commercial and defense platforms leveraging Shield AI software development kit FARNBOROUGH, United Kingdom (July 22, 2026)   —  Honeywell Aerospace (Nasdaq: HONA) and Shield AI, a leader in AI-powered mission autonomy, today announced a Memorandum of Understanding under which Honeywell Aerospace will develop a trusted autonomy software stack on Shield AI’s Hivemind Software Development Kit, integrating Honeywell Aerospace’s...

Now we’re getting to the fun stuff: GitOps . The act of pushing beautifully crafted .yaml files and seeing your Kubernetes cluster get red and stall out is surely what life’s all about. Install ArgoCD We have our Kubernetes cluster and now we’re going to bootstrap ArgoCD so it starts syncing from our git repository. Using helm: helm install argocd \ --repo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm \ argo-cd \ --namespace argocd \ --create-namespace \ ...

With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat . But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available . They have five headline findings: Code generation is no longer the bottleneck — verification is. ‘Harness engineering’ is emerging as a distinct, ownable discipline. Organizations are colliding with a real apprenticeship crisis. The executive/engineer expectation ...

This year, I have the honor of serving as the program chair for the Haskell Symposium , co-located with the 2026 International Conference on Functional Programming , or ICFP to its friends 1 , on August 28-29 in Indianapolis, Indiana! The Haskell Symposium has existed in some form or another since 1995, and I’m proud to be part of this long tradition, now in its thirtieth iteration this year (wow!). It’s also a homecoming for me, since I did my PhD in Indiana back in my callow youth. I...

Every week, I discuss with people who want to get a PhD. For years, I have been advising people not to pursue a PhD. It may come as a surprise to some. You would expect people with a PhD to earn more money. Individuals who complete doctorates tend to have higher cognitive abilities and greater motivation. But smarter people tend to earn more, period. So do people with a PhD earn more? Historically, PhD holders earn more, but the bulk of the observed advantage is concentrated among those wh...

(This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base knowledge needed, and he was obviously a very brilliant programmer. But that operation of writing a minimal yet working Unix kernel for the 386 (at the beginning Linux was, let's say, mono-architecture) was something within t...

In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. Today, everyone can write sort-of-okay CSS by delegating the task to an LLM. LLMs make everybody into a generalist. Because of this, lots of people don’t think there’s any skill involved in working with LLMs. If you want the product that LLMs can deliver — PhD-level mathematics, pretty good...

One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather than slowing down came as a huge shock to the field. Something had to be driving that acceleration, and dark energy was proposed as the cause. What began as a seismic shock in… Source One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have know...

This is a PSA post, and the TLDR is this: if you were subscribed to one of my newsletters, you should log into the Buttondown portal and make sure your preferences are correct. Also, I updated the domain name used, and new emails will arrive from thoughts@walks.manuelmoreale.dev , so make sure your email doesn’t treat it as spam. I mentioned in a previous post that I have done some work on the newsletter side of my digital life. I used to have 4 different newsletters; I’m now down t...

This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model's guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the model broke its way out of OpenAI's sandbox, then found exploits to break in to Hugging Face, all so it could cheat on the test by stealing the answers. Along the way it helped make the strongest case yet for how the imbalance of model availability is hurting our ability to secure our software. Here's wh...

My great pal Eric Drysdale sent out one last note to a set of friends about an event he thought that set would enjoy, and I am extremely lucky to be included in that set. Eric has a beautiful and exquisite comedic sense, an opinion I have that is borne out by his legacy of comedic work, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and more. He has stood down 20 years of a world gone mad and reworked it, within hours, into a performance of...

Hello! I’m on a funny journey right now where I’m trying to learn how to make websites in a sort of 2010 style, where I have an SQL database and render some HTML on the backend. It’s kind of an interesting journey because it doesn’t necessarily feel “easy” to me to make websites in this way: I never learned how to do it in the 2000s or 2010s, and there’s a lot I need to learn. So here are some Django features that make building this kind of site feel more achievable than when I...

I think if I had my time again, I would have become a software developer. I just so much fun - coming up with ways to solve a problem in an elegant way is very satisfying. Then people emailing saying they enjoy the tools I'm creating. Very rewarding! Mind you, would it still be as fun if it was my job? I don't know. 🤔 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ Y...

I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design the 29th annual ICFP programming contest. Designing a programming contest in a world with AI agents is tricky! I think we've made some interesting choices here. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/im-running-the-icfp-programming-contest I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design...

Our entire complex is getting new active fire damper units, and today it’s our turn. Half the flat is covered with tarp and sheets, and the loud sound of drills and saws is piercing the air and, hopefully, the ceiling where the new dampers are being installed. Fire dampers are shutters designed to block the flow of hot air and smoke through ventilation ducts in the event of a fire. Along with fire doors and walls/floors rated to specific fireproof ratings, fire dampers are designed to stop t...

A montage of some asteroids and comets photographed up close by spacecraft. Image: The Planetary Society Why explore asteroids, comets, and other small worlds When to worry about an asteroid hitting Earth Psyche, exploring a metal world Japan wants to sample Mars’ moon Phobos with its MMX mission Weirdest types of moons in our Solar System Related:   Articles on moons other than our Moon ...

0.0 Context Setting Tuesday, 21 July 2026 in Portland, Oregon where it’s been hot. There’s been a Fifa Men’s World Cup Football Final which in my humble opinion went to the right team. 0.1 How People Work, Live! ... with Pavel Samsonov How People Work, Live! is a live version of my workshop, How People Work. I get to invite an interesting guest on and we talk about the hard things to do with the soft skills you need to not just get jobs done, but to do them well. You know, the soft ...

Back in the 90s when I was a young professor at the University of Chicago, we would have a Complexity Class of the Week  where I would take some interesting complexity class, write down on a white board everything we knew about it with some open problems and students and faculty would muse over it. When I started the blog in 2002, I took the concept online .  My first Complexity Class of the Week post  covered the class \(S_2^P\). Recently Rahul Santhanam said to me "\(L_2^P\) is the new \...

The eleventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 11, I chat with flaMEd , the author of flamedfury.com about, among other things, web communities around games and television shows, sharing music interests with a personal website, community in the indie web, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. flaMEd flamedfury.com The eleventh episode of Wonders of Web Weav...